In the United States, prison inmates have certain visitation rights. By allowing prisoners to have some contact with the outside world while incarcerated, the justice system aims to facilitate their transition back into society upon release. Traditional forms of contact include telephone calls, in-person visitation, conjugal visits, etc. More recently, technological advances have allowed jails and prisons to provide other types of visitation, including videoconferences and online chat sessions. The duration and frequency of these visitations may depend upon the prison's rules, regulations, or the like. Generally speaking, inmate visitation may be supervised or unsupervised. At the time of a scheduled video visitation, for example, an officer may physically move the inmate from his or her cell or to a visitation device or station in a designated area within the correctional facility, where he or she may be able to conduct the communication with a non-resident of that facility. When the visitation is over, the officer may then escort the inmate back to his or her cell.
The inventor hereof has discovered, however, that in many cases poor lighting conditions in the video visitation areas typically yield very low quality images. In many cases, the low quality may be attributed to poor lighting conditions in the facility's visitation areas. Unlike non-residents participating in a video visitation session, inmates have little (if any) control over their own environment—e.g., there may be insufficient artificial light, no windows or natural light, etc. For these and other reasons, the inventor hereof has developed various systems and methods of software-controlled lighting for video visitation devices as described herein.